The ability to meter postage indicia for printing postage meter stamps at user's locations, such as home and office, has been available for an appreciable amount of time. For example, postage meters using mechanical postage value “vaults” have been widely used in businesses throughout the world for printing postage indicia, commonly referred to as postage meter stamps, on an as-needed basis. In more recent years, electronic systems were developed using electronic postage value vaults to provide improved security. The evolution of such electronic systems has ultimately led to the development of postage metering systems which allow remote metering operations using communications via the public switched telephone network (PSTN), local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and the Internet. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,249,777 entitled “System and Method for Remote Postage Metering,” U.S. Pat. No. 6,671,813 entitled “Secure On-Line PC Postage Metering System,” and U.S. Pat. No. 7,149,726 entitled “Online Value Bearing Item Printing,” the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference, show various electronic value bearing indicia (VBI) metering systems facilitating remote metering operations.
Each of the foregoing postage metering systems have implemented some form of printing apparatus in order to provide convenient printing of postage meter stamps on demand. Such postage meter stamp printing operations have typically implemented specialized printing technologies. Accordingly, the print mechanisms and attendant systems are often quite expensive, complicated, slow, and inconvenient.
For example, controlled inks, such as fluorescent inks of special color, have been required with respect to printing mechanisms providing mechanical impression of postage meter stamps. The use of such inks is often inconvenient for the users and can be quite messy. Moreover, the printing mechanisms must typically be relatively complex in order to accommodate various sizes, shapes, and thicknesses of mail items.
Electronic postage metering systems have more recently begun using information based indicia (IBI) which may be printed using commonly available inks and toners. However, users must typically provide at least some information for each mail item in order for validation to later be performed with respect to IBI based postage meter stamps. Moreover, generating the IBI, typically including cryptographic signatures and other data, generally requires appreciable time. The symbology used in IBI based postage meter stamps (e.g., PDF417 barcode) is relatively complicated and dense, generally requiring a high quality print image. Accordingly, relatively expensive and/or complex printing equipment is often needed to provide sufficient quality printing.
Application on uneven or non-uniform surfaces, such as may be associated with a stuffed envelope or other mail item, is problematic with respect to mechanical postage meter stamp impressions and printed image postage meter stamps alike. Application upon such surfaces can result in distortion, incomplete printing, and the like, rendering the postage meter stamp unusable or otherwise unacceptable. Accordingly, the foregoing postage metering systems are often unable to accommodate some mailing scenarios.